Time to whack the ostriches

Comment

Australian icons are not that rare if you believe the hyperbole fed via the mass media each day. Blindly regurgitating lowest common denominator tripe, they willingly pronounce the awesome greatness of THIS iconic packet of soap or THAT breakfast cereal, THIS sportsperson and THAT car; critical facilities utterly neutered.

So you can feel free to label Otto an iconoclast because today's the day we announce the great Aussie-made car's not actually out and about clad in its strides. Iconic status declined. Denuded. Departed!
 
Sacrilegious, maybe, but true nonetheless.

No one shouts louder in the defence of our homegrown rear-wheel-drive big six than the local motoring media. Yet the constant mewing about how Ford and GM must keep their rear-drive platforms alive into the second decade of the 21st century is sounding more hollow with each (diff) whine...
 
Car company execs have welded their noses to pages of the local buff mags for too long and now it's too late to take a sniff of the air in the real world. Sales figures should have been telling them to get their act together and join the switch to front and all-wheel drive, but they refused, believing Aussie drivers were blindly in love with their product. Wrong...

You only have to peruse the sales statistics to see what a load of baloney that is.

FG Falcon sales? In the crapper.

VE Commodore sales? Never as good as the VT, even accepting the AU Falcon was a shocker.

Toyota Avalon? What the? Yes, it was front-wheel drive, but a big boofy six that didn't sell no matter how hard Toyota polished it. Notice how the Aurion is but a repowered Camry with a glitzy veneer?

So now, the big two are shuddering to a grinding halt like a grader on slashed tyres. Sales in their US parent companies' home market are dire, too, making the retention of peculiar Aussie-only spec platforms untenable. Ford and GM US sales declined a mere 20 per cent in August (so Ford Australia is a shining star with sales off by only 0.4 per cent compared with Holden's 11.6 per cent deficit to date, according to VFACTS).

"It's the oil price spike stupid," as Bill Clinton would have said, presuming he'd missed Al Gore's scare-mongering about peak oil and ozone holes and domestic electricity bills.

We all know how cheap gas kept GM and Ford rolling along on the backs of their oversized utes while the Asians cranked out more and more efficient small cars that only the poor in American purchased.

Toyota and Nissan were suckered into following Ford and GM with the majestically monikered Tundra and Titan transplant-produced twins. But they'll die a painful death alongside the F150 and Silverado and their five-doored SUV offspring nonetheless... No one wants to pay $2.00 a litre, especially in US$, to keep a gas-guzzler fed.

The repercussions mean Ford and Holden in Australia are now finding little love for their plans for future rear-drive programs because whichever way Uncle Bob and Uncle Al spin it, rear-drive is not on the route to lower consumption and low emissions -- specifically in countries outside Australia.

The sharpest suits in the pack can't sanction bastard rear-drive platforms even if there's a market Down Under, (which there isn't anymore) because every business case is global and if there's no export future, there is no future.

Ford might be marginally ahead though, in that it has cemented plans to build the next Focus in Australia. Question is: will the Falcon still be coming down the line when the Focus comes on stream?

With a cold heart and a Kevlar jacket buttoned up tight, Otto's foxhole telegraph taps out the merciless news that the answer to that should be NO.

Not ‘could be' NO or ‘may be' NO, but ‘should be'.

Reason is that Focus is not just one car but the basis of a family of four (and five) cylinder frugal advanced-generation vehicles as diverse as the C-MAX mini MPV and Kuga all-wheel drive. Just take a look at the overall passenger market and tell me where the hot sales slots are? Where's the future growth?

Will large powerful multi-cylinder sedans and SUVs rise again like T2, or will the agile, feisty four-pot screamers with their pert medium-sized MPV bodies and fresh-as-daisy tech rule the post Control Blade runner future?

VFACTS has the writing on the wall. Mazda 3 has outsold Falcon year-to-date 2008, and, before you squawk about model change-overs, the Mazda 3 was ahead of the Falcon this time last year too.

Were Ford Australia to plunge into the Focus family production business, it might even get a sports job out of it as there's rumoured to be a new Capri hot hatch in the works that would combine the best of the 1970s European cars and the 1990s Aussie job.

The key to the success of this plan would be that all these models would have export potential to our neighbours with whom current and future bilateral trade arrangements would ease the path to tariff-free exchanges. We'd take their Utes and sell them our hatches.

So ‘Outraged of Broadmeadows', before you write in or hire an off-duty hitman, ask yourself, are you a true blue Ford fan or merely a Falcon fetishist? If it's the latter, you're in for sad times ahead.

True, it's hard to get excited about Ford's import offerings on a visceral basis at present, but in the cold hard light of future business plans, the marketing guys will be pinned to the floor and told to get on with the job of getting folks more excited about XR5 than XR6, and XR4 not XR8.

The market is giving Ford that message already in two ways. One: they aren't buying Falcons like they used to; and two they aren't buying Ford's imports like they used to.

The market is moving to aspiring prestige Japanese brands for four-cylinder cars that perform well enough in our speed camera blanketed society. You'd think the Mondeo might capture some more of that market.

Ford's future job, and Holden's too, is to ensure that Toyota doesn't sprint to 30 per cent of the total market and leave the once-proud dominant brands wrestling with Mitsubishi and Nissan over the scraps as Mazda, Volkswagen, and Honda rise to new heights powered by diesel, hybrid and super-economy petrol engines.

Much is spruiked about our engineering prowess, and it's true we do have some smart guys in lab coats. Given the tools and the budget we could build an Australian engine for an oil-free or oil-depleted future. But no one's ponied up the dough yet.

Holden lobbed a thought-bubble out once. But in reality it had no chance to develop the Eco-Commodore in 2000, because the factory just couldn't churn out enough VXs to meet demand, so the business plan -- if there was one -- sank into the sand.

Ford was in so deep then it was more than relieved that Geoff Polites could wangle the cash for the BA revival, let alone devise a radical tree-hugging eco-friendly version. Ford's sole answer to changing market tastes was the Territory. And a fine vehicle though it may be, (and almost presciently V8-free), it's no parsimonious Lexus hybrid stalker.

Reluctantly, one must conclude that someone in the Toyota advertising copywriting bunker has hit it on the head: The game has changed.

Too few of us want to buy Australian-made big sixes with rear-wheel drive. Imports offer large cars with frugal engines (some powered by a mysterious liquid called diesel) that not only make the Falcadore look thirsty, but also dirty at the same time. Pssst: Mondeo!

Luckily we have a fresh new government in Canberra that wants to make an environmental statement and protect the local mob with their dirty cars, by hiking up the Luxury Car Tax.

Such is new Labor's chip-on-the-shoulder urge to slug the fat cats it considered a compromise whereby luxury imports with low consumption and low emission engines would have earned an LCT tax break, while the thirstiest and dirtiest long-wheel base local cars copped the tax hike. You'll recall the genesis of the LCT (under old Labor) was to protect these local behemoths from the advancing imports that now could qualify for the proposed tax break. Irony, thy name is Swan...

So, if it's not bad enough that working families are spurning the home-grown base big sixes for imported fours, now we have our own cashed-up bogan long-wheel-base buyers forking out more tax to drive their dirtier, thirstier cars through the McSuburbs.

Now, the bloke who can explain that with a straight face... Mate, he's not an icon; he's a legend.

To comment on this article click here